5 Must-Include Components in your Knowledge Base Portal

While talking about the knowledge base, everyone knows its benefits, but how to avail those always remained a question. But it won’t be for a long time.

Are you wondering what to include in your Knowledge Base Portal?

Here’s a quick guide.

Before going through the components of a knowledge management portal, make sure that the knowledge base meets your customer needs, is easy to navigate, and has SEO optimized content.

Alright! Let’s start!

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs are a list of commonly asked questions and answers. It doesn’t require much technical support or expertise. The benefit of including it in your knowledge base portal is that your staff will be free of answering repetitive questions. Instead, they can simply redirect customers to the respective FAQ section. FAQs will also increase the visibility of your website on Google and other search engines.

The best example to understand the effectiveness of FAQs is a bank website. Customers have several queries related to account details, personal details, debit, credit, shares, etc. And it’s not feasible for bank employees to explain to every customer about the procedure to update their bank details, so FAQs.

Tutorials and How-to Guides

Sometimes, your customers want more than the FAQs or say, FAQs couldn’t solve their problems. They want a detailed guide of the solution/service. That’s when tutorials and how-to-guides come for the rescue.

How-to-Guides act as a mini-guide to explain a procedure or an action. For example, how to register for the XYZ service? They help to get acquainted with the basic system or service.

On the other hand, tutorials include a detailed guide about a topic and other related processes. Slack set the best example. They have tutorials for almost everything.

So make sure to include both the formats in your knowledge base portal. Also, make the instructions clear, and don’t forget to include GIFs, images, diagrams, and videos, wherever necessary.

Pro tip: Try to create a separate tutorial section like that of FAQs.

Community Section

Provide functional community space for the community to interact and help one another. We might think about what would be its benefit for our business and our knowledge management portal. Firstly, users generate content by writing tutorials, discussing issues, and providing detailed answers. All this reduces the load of your content creation team. Secondly, in need of help, users can help one another, reducing the customer support team’s work stress. Last but not least, the community can help you promote your knowledge base and product.

News and Update Section

Do you have a separate section for announcements and updates or add it to your blog section? If no, that’s fine! However, having a separate space for community announcements, product updates, new version releases, issues, and bugs would help your customers keep up with them easily. These announcements, if mixed with blogs, can get lost somewhere in between dozens of articles.

Some companies, like Asana, even try to keep their news section and update section separate. They don’t want customers to keep searching; instead, know what’s going around.

Reference Documentation

These documents target the technical audience, such as software developers. They are useful in new software, APIs, or retrieving information about the command-line interface, drivers, or file formats. Examples include Zapier and Docker.

Reference docs are not limited to software. Even gadgets or other electronics could benefit from it.

Conclusion

Every company today has a knowledge base, internal or external. And meeting customers’ demands through it might look like a challenge and these components, a not-so-sure topic. But try including FAQs, Community Section, Documentation, and others on the list. It will surely help you grow.

4 Tips for Knowledge Base Content

Just bookmark it, is the new just-write-it-down. But we do both. We use Post-its, handwritten to-do lists, scribbled notes, and many such things. Digital bookmarks and dozens of browser open tabs. Anyone who tries to get any personal information organized and accessible at the moment knows that it can be challenging and unproductive.

Product knowledge base provides customers with the information they need in a less challenging way. It is not as complicated as you think. You can create, curate, and share effective knowledge base articles. You can easily do it if you have the right guidance and tools like a knowledge management portal.

Best practices for knowledge base articles:

By providing a knowledge base to your customers, you are enabling them to find quick solutions and reduce inefficient call center performance. Knowledge base requires proper planning and design actually to be able to help. Otherwise, it will not serve your agents or customers and create chaos, not to mention your customers will leave with even more problems than they came with.

We all want to provide our customers with informative, engaging, and clear content; these best practices can work wonders.

Create level-based content:

Does your knowledge management portal provide customers everything they need? Think from the perspective of all kinds of users, from beginners to experts. Yes, even experts have something to learn from the knowledgebase. Start from how-tos and step specific instructions for beginners and go from there.

Experienced users ignore those to get the information they need. If one article does not work for both user types, you can also split the information according to the topic/problem into different articles and then link all of them to the original one. This way you are creating a series that takes the user through a journey of the product or service.

Anchor links:

Putting links inside articles in your enterprise knowledge portal is a great way to allude to something that you might not want to fully explain in the article but is necessary. Use relevant keywords for the links instead of saying ‘click here’. The user should be able to know why there is a link there and what it leads to before they click on it. These links are useful in lengthy articles so people can click on them and jump to the exact information.

Create simple content:

BY 2025, 3/4 number of people are expected to come online via their smartphone. Take a look at the style and UI/UX of your article and content and the knowledge management portal as a whole. Make sure it is smart phone friendly. Look at it from a formatting POV, big blocks of text in small paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and callouts, CTAs. These things will make your content more approachable.

Short articles are a good choice for knowledge base articles. People need these articles to answer questions in the moment rather than spend time reading long forms. Keep the language simple and approachable. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes to choose topics based on pain points. Two good sources of titles are recent support tickets and customer search terms.

Finally, images, GIFs, and explanation videos are strong ways to reinforce your support articles. They also help you provide your audience with pauses between paragraphs and an excellent way to engage them.

Structure the articles properly:

Treat each article like a mini onboarding process. For example: start by using simple words to describe a problem, and then use an example to show customers how to solve it. Solution articles are to help, even though it might be tempting to use them to sell, keep the focus on the instructions and the features that each article is about.

Create content that adapts to the customer’s workflow. Take them on a journey from one point to the other based on the natural flow of your product. Give people easy solutions first as often they work the best. Keep things moving, and don’t give alternative solutions as that can confuse them. Place related content with each article or video so the user can quickly get to those.

Conclusion:

Technology has made companies more accessible to customers, and now they are used to getting all the answers immediately. It has also helped companies scale much faster. With fierce competition in products, customer happiness has become a factor in measuring a company’s success. And self-service via portals helps with that a great deal.

5 MUST haves in your Knowledge Management Portal

Knowledge Portals are tricky to get right. If they do not solve customers’ queries, they are not worth investing in.

The basic purpose of any Knowledge Portal should always be to:

– Enable users to find the information they REALLY need

– Provide updated and fresh information

While we live in a digital world, it is important that your knowledge portal carries the basic features for a great user experience. Because there will be new trends, but the essential features would always remain the same.

Delete Outdated Content

A Knowledge Portal means the bank of the organization’s documents. And when we hear that, we all imagine – a bunch of unorganized stuff.

Even if there is an in-built search engine in place, it will sort the data by relevance, and not as per the quality. That means if your customer is looking for a particular report, and the search engine finds 4 different copies, how they will be able to distinguish which one is the latest?

Hence, it is important that the content in your database is updated from time to time and curated.

Simply, delete the outdated content.

So, does your knowledge portal enable you to do that?

You can also enable users to comment, tag, and rate content, flag outdated, and erroneous information. Based on the feedback, content admin can hide or delete “bad data”. Also, the ratings will help users to identify relevant content easier.

Is your “Find” feature good enough?

When thinking about helping users, it is important to understand that “find” is much more than just search. As Seth notes, “A knowledge management portal with the correct information architecture allows users to both search and browse.”

Do your customers have access to all the information they require? It is important that your portal provides a 360-degree view of the information. Otherwise, users will have to visit other references. It should be capable enough to provide easy access to people, expertise, communities, collaborative content, structured data, and rich media such as images and video.

In addition, a properly configured knowledge portal should enable you to “push” information directly to users’ desktops, mobile devices via email, RSS, or any other medium. It enables users to spend zero time in seeking information, and have it delivered directly to them in real-time.

Now it is your turn to find out how your knowledge portal provides information to users. Does it provide access to all the information your users need? Does it enable multiple forms of information discovery that help them find the right information at the right time?

Mobile Access

At times of crisis like COVID-19, remote work and BYOD adoption are picking up the pace. Hence, your users require a quick, easy, way to access information from any device they’re using. Also, the solution should be integrated allowing knowledge access without switching apps.

Customer Communities and Sharing

If no one is reading your material, then it won’t be effective as anticipated. Hence, your knowledge sharing solution should let you send information to external users. This way, you can successfully drive prospects in the funnel and track which content is working, and which is not.

Also once a lead converts, it is still important to build customer loyalty. A KMS with a “community of learning” for customers can quickly establish your name as an industry leader and customers would keep coming back.

Reporting and Analytics

Tangible results are important for a business’s impact. Unfortunately, many organizations do not focus on the value being created with the Knowledge portal and focus on other metrics to measure success.

It is important for you to know which data enables employees to become more productive? Are your team members actively collaborating and sharing knowledge with each other? Are the answers actually helping them?

Robust analytics can help you identify such insights making the elimination of outdated data easier.

Now you know!

Investing in a knowledge management portal is like buying a new house. You need to double-check and make sure to have all the important aspects in place before making the purchase. And now you know which ones can be your success formula.

Education Portal: Bring the Campus Home

Just like I’m writing this article from home, there are a huge number of students who have to study from home. Studying and teaching even inside a school infrastructure can be challenging. Previously, we have written about how the logistics of teaching and learning can be overcome with an education portal. But now the challenges we face are even more challenging.

Schools used to rely on class participation, infrastructural facilities like lab, projectors, library, etc. There used to be a structure to a typical school or college day that would go about. COVID-19 has pronounced school as public places, therefore shutting them down and sending kids home.

The greatest thing about learning at a school is that everyone gets equal facilities. The computers are all the same, the lunch hours are the same, the library is accessible by all, and there is internet access. Moving this entire system home is of course difficult.

The first challenge will come in the form of internet access, and the second in the form of a computer. Even if we assume and these are available, we have to assume they might not be consistent. So what are the changes you can make as an educational institution to make it possible for your students to keep learning and your faculty to keep teaching?

Get a portal.

If you have a portal, modify it to do more than what it is doing right now. It is no longer limited to marking attendance and getting homework assignments. This will mean getting the best of the best.

Let’s do a deep dive into what the portal can do for your institution during this pandemic:

Video classes:

Classes have to be online. But not all classes can take place at a single time for everyone because your students may be in different time zones. So professors also have to have an interface where they can easily record classes, live or otherwise, which can then be stored. The class interface should also have a chat option where students can ask questions and teachers can answer them. This will bring everyone’s experience a little closer to what they used to have in the classrooms.

Assignment interface:

All assignments are now online. That means it will require an interface that makes it easy for students and professors to interact with or collaborate on assignments. Simply uploading a bunch of questions on a document and getting answers to those is not going to be enough.

So this interface needs to be more interactive. It should allow more formats, like multiple choice questions, longer essays, pop quizzes that are only available for certain hours to ensure participation, etc.

Office hours:

A number of professors have dedicated office hours. This is where they have one on one interaction with students. Here they discuss their assignments, clear doubts that the students have, and guide them in all their academics.

So the education portal needs to have an interface specially designed for this. The professor can feed in their office hours, and the students can see those hours, and request an appointment. The meeting can then be over a video call or a phone call, which can be logged in to the portal.

Exams:

Since in person exams cannot be held, there needs to be a digital interface for it. This includes pop quizzes, open book exams, and more. Certain measures can be put into it like time limits for each question, only one attempt, etc. can help ensure a smoother anti cheating exam while maintaining the workflow of the school at the same time.

The education portal’s strengths while in use on campus are different than in remote use. While on campus, if there was a flaw, it would be less disadvantageous than if it happened while everyone is accessing it remotely.

As far as the administration of the school is concerned, the portal handles all the things remotely like it did on campus, minus things like classroom allocation, etc.

Professors and admin staff should also have a special interface built in that allows them to have meetings, to keep things running smoothly.

Apart from that, this education portal needs to be lightweight since everyone will not have the kind of internet access that a school does.

At CRMJetty, our team can cater to academic institutions’ needs. You can browse our previous blog, and even read the whitepaper. Your custom online education portal will thrive in our hands.